Renegades Everywhere at the Olympics

It was like a who's who of Australian volleyball in Sydney over the Olympics and it made you realise just how small the volleyball community is in this country - it was largely the same faces with many people already knowing each other.

Panoramic view of the northern venues at Sydney Olympic Park.
Stadium Australia, Super Dome, food and merchandise halls, baseball stadium, The Dome, The Pavillions (including the volleyball venue), Olympic Park railway station.
(Photos taken and merged by Kev Lentin, PhotoPoint Album)

Despite the Games being held interstate, Melbourne University Renegades Volleyball Club put in a strong showing over the two weeks of volleyball competition. Several members also went straight on to play at the Australian University Games in Ballarat where they won silver.

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Renegades and friends enjoying a drink at the pub after the women's semi-finals.
Back row: David Martin, Dave Warwick, Phil Richter, Ben Atcliffe
Front row: Hanneke, Jacqui, Tene Bond, Tim Richter, Gus Cirillo.

It had been nearly two years coming for most of the Melbourne University Renegades volunteers who had filled out their volunteer application forms together in 1998, one night at the pub after training. In the end, there were nine Renegades volunteers plus several other University of Melbourne students working at the volleyball and Jake who worked in the media for BBC.

Tene Bond - Sports Presentation

Dave Warwick - Field of Play

Gus Cirillo - Field of Play

David Martin - Event Control (statistics)

Ben Atcliffe - Beach Volleyball field of play

Hanneke (Hanne) - Kenya women's Team Liason

Tung Le - Field of Play, Equipment

Tram Le - Field of Play

Jesse Adams - Scoreboard Operator

Jake Avent - BBC Media Olympic Reporting

Jenny Hiller - Statistician (Waverley Sisu VVL club)

Emma Hiller - Volleyball (Waverley Sisu VVL club)

Plenty of other Renegades, including Sue and Sacha, Pascal, Quan, Duy, Kris (Billy), Mick (Masters Renegade), Nick (Masters Renegade), Tim and Phil, also came up to enjoy the matches. So, with additional friends, family and acquaintances coming along as spectators as well, some days just felt like we were all back in Melbourne.

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Relaxing at the pub after a full day's volleyball.
Tom, Ben, Dave
Despite the yellow t-shirts, no, they're not Brasilian - 1000s of those yellow t-shirts were handed out throughout the Games.

Indeed, as we became accustomed to international standard volleyball, it was easy to forget where we were and start to think it was just another volleyball tournament. However, being at the first medal ceremony for the women's volleyball competition after living in Sydney for three weeks finally brought home the fact that this wasn't normal...it wasn't just a country tournament, it wasn't the university games, we'd actually just spent three fantastic weeks at THE Olympics.

Everyone involved agreed it was truly an experience of a lifetime. Two full weeks of volleyball competition unmatched in Australia's history, including one of the all time best volleyball matches when the Italian men took on eventual gold medalists, Yugoslavia, during the preliminary rounds.

As the finals approached, seats in the stands for volunteers become harder and harder to come by and people started complaining about having to sit high in the stands, far from the action. Someone noted at the pub one night though that it was truly amazing to be complaining about having to sit so far from the court to watch volleyball in Australia - no one would have believed it possible before the Olympics came to town when crowds of over 1000 were exceptional.

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Stadium Australia bathed in sunshine on the morning of the women's marathon.

The Australian indoor volleyball teams took steps almost as large as the gold medal winning beach volleyballers. Both the mens and womens teams won matches at the olympic level for the first time. The Australian men's indoor team did particularly well, causing a big upset over Spain and winning their way through to the quarter finals. On the beach, we all know how well the Australian teams did, with Cook and Pottharst winning the women's gold medal at Bondi. In every match the Australians played, the crowd was awesome...almost 10,000 people cheering and clapping each point.

And now, it's back to reality...just a handful of friends in the "crowd", balls travelling at half the speed, hours of training in the gym...but a host of wonderful memories and dreams of what volleyball could be like in Australia.

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Sydney Entertainment Centre with the main lights off, two days before competition began.

For further news and stories from the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games, see the Olympic Volleyball pages on this site.